EMIS

Duration: 2023

Partner countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine

Partner institutions:

• Eurasian Coalition on Health, Rights, Gender and Sexual Diversity (ECOM), Estonia;
• South Eastern Europe Regional TB and HIV Community Network (SEE RCN), Bosnia and Herzegovina

Involved RKI unit: Unit 34

Challenges addressed by the project

Integrated biological-behavioural surveillance (IBBS) studies among men who have sex with men (MSM) have been conducted in most countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to evaluate and measure progress in reaching HIV-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A review of IBBS studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia commissioned by WHO Europe revealed problems measuring HIV prevalence in several of the countries using respondent driven sampling (RDS) as recruitment method. In these countries, RDS appeared to fail to recruit MSM already diagnosed with HIV, resulting in an underestimation of HIV prevalence. In addition, several of the countries already announced that they feel unable to continue with the relatively costly and labour-intense RDS studies.

Objectives

Project goal is to establish a cooperation with national civil society organizations working with gay, bisexual, and other men having sex with men and public health institutions to ensure broad participation in a large low-threshold online survey with self-reported health outcomes, to which participants will be recruited by advertisement on gay dating apps and in gay social networks in Eastern European and Central Asian countries, and strengthen respective capacities in Western Balkan countries, as an additional approach to HIV-IBBS for the key population of MSM. Online surveys have become a commonly used instrument to collect data from populations that use the internet and social media to communicate among each other and that are difficult to reach by methods used for "representative" population samples.

Overview of activities

The online survey questionnaire has been developed based on the European MSM Internet Survey (EMIS-2017) questionnaire, after consultation of representatives of community partners in the participating countries. Revisions and adaptations have been agreed between participating researchers. The questionnaire is translated into the national languages of all participating countries. The multi-language online questionnaire is programmed on a commercial survey platform. A survey promotion concept has been developed that will use a combination of promotion via internationally operating dating apps and local promotion including social media and snowball methods.

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